We prove the existence of a Pareto optimal state of a finite society that has socially differentiated persons, each with non-binary personal preferences that quasi-order a finite set of alternatives. Everybody engages in a volitional act of choice by maximization of non-binary preferences. As a...

Ken Arrow (1998) asks, “What has economics to say about racial discrimination?” He replies – entirely correctly – that racial “segregation within an industry – that is, firms with either all black or all white labor forces” – may be explained by economic theory, but “the...

Diverse identities, some socially shared, arise from a person’s affiliation with multiple overlapping communities, which are non-disjoint subsets of persons in society. I prove that identification of each individual with binary preferences or their utility function representation, commonplace...

This paper examines some of the consequences for economic theory of the replacement of binary personal preferences by non-binary personal preferences in an Arrow-Debreu society as in Debreu (1959), and reaches the conclusion that there is both much damage to existing theory and greater...